Self Preservation
by Trillian4210
Summary: For Raphael and Jaime, time is running out. But a confrontation of the horrible night that brought them together might not be enough to save them. RaphaelxOC
1. Chapter 1

_A/N Thought I'd take a break from my usual fandom and give this a shot. Rated mostly for language. _

_Dedicated to **Dierdre**, who really knows how to tell a story. _

**Self-Preservation**

It was 2:10am when Raphael saw Jaime lock up the bar. That meant a slow night. Raphael sometimes had to wait until nearly three a.m. before he saw her—the long mane of brown curls under the neon sign and the keys jangling in her hands. Alone at 2:10 meant no stragglers. That was good. He hated the stragglers. They sometimes gave Jaime a hard time—tried to hit on her, tried to touch her. Raphael, from his perch on the roof across the alley, could hear their slurred, lewd comments. He watched with a scowl as the regulars tried to hug her, as though she were their friend, all the while their hands inching towards her ass. Jaime knew how to handle them—with a smart remark and a firm disentangling from their sloppy embraces—but still, Raphael didn't like it. But on this night, at 2:10am, she was alone.

It was a cold, late-October night when the air felt like it would crystallize at any moment but for the biting wind that broke the icy stillness. It was too early for a real winter but Raphael could see the breath plume out in front of Jaime as though she were smoking one of her many cigarettes. She wore tight black leather pants cinched by a spiked belt and short, puffy jacket over god-knows-what kind of skimpy top.

_"Nice shirt," Raphael commented dryly. "Where's the rest of it?"_

"_The bar is always hot," she said and laughed at his dark expression. _

"_No wonder those assholes don't keep their hands to themselves. You don't leave them much to the imagination." _

_Jaime opened her mouth to retort but snapped it shut and studied him a moment. "You don't seem to mind what I wear here."_

_Raphael snorted. "Here, it's different. It's your apartment. You can wear what you want. It's…different."_

"_Is it?" she persisted with a crooked smile. _

"_Yeah, it is," Raphael growled and set his beer bottle down hard on the table to emphasize his point. _

_Jaime studied him a moment more and then teased, "You're such a hypocrite." _

_He only grunted and quickly looked away to hide the red that surfaced from under the green of his cheeks. _ _She was right. He liked her in her wife-beater tanktops, slim and tight over her small breasts. They showed off her toned arms and the tattoos that adorned them. He liked seeing her in those; he just didn't want anyone else to._

_He felt her gaze on him a moment more and just before the silence grew too long, she made a joke and they laughed and everything was okay again…_

Jaime locked up the bar—a dingy, dark place called Lucky 13—and stuffed the keys into the pocket of her puffy jacket. She stood for a moment, silent in the shadowy alley, and glanced around. Her gaze trailed past the Lucky 13's red neon sign, down the alley, and finally across the way and up. Raphael felt her gaze fall on him like a warm mist and then it was gone again. She never could see him until he wanted her to but that was okay by her; she knew he was there. Raphael watched as a small, crooked smile flitted across her face and then, satisfied, she began to walk.

New York at night, at 2:10am, was no safe place. The haunts came out, both loud and soft. The loud ones drove slick cars, weaving across the streets, cursing for the bars had kicked them out before their night had ended. These were the assholes who drove up alongside Jaime, asking her if she needed a ride, asking her if she was _working_—as if she were for sale—with their crazy-loud, laughing voices.

"No, thanks," preceded, "Fuck off," and if that didn't work, Raphael did.

The quiet ones, the dangerous ones, slunk out from the shadows with gravelly, desperate voices and dirty hands. These were the ones Raphael watched for as he crept along the rooftops—one eye on the shadows and one eye out for fire escapes or street posts to scale down if she needed him.

This night, as with most nights, the streets were quiet and Jaime walked purposefully, but not fast. She knew Raphael was there but he thought darkly on all those countless nights before his patrol route took him to her—all those nights in which she had walked alone. He thought too, of that horrible, nightmare night, the night they met had first met face to face and his scowl deepened. Jaime wasn't careless, but she wasn't afraid. Raphael thought she should be.

_"I've been mugged twice," she said. "That's it. No big deal."_

What about that night, Jaime? _he thought._ _ What about the time that was a Very Big Deal? The night we met? But they had made an unspoken agreement that they would not talk about it and it seemed at times to Raphael that she'd blocked it completely from her mind. Like now._

"_Before there was you, Raphael," she continued, "there was my pepper spray." Raphael grunted only and she laughed. "My pepper spray, at least, doesn't drink all my beer and leave footprints on my coffee table."_

_But it didn't save you that night, did it? he wanted to ask. It didn't kill for you. _

"_I've been doing pretty okay," she insisted with mounting ire. She was reading his face and hearing his thoughts and he could practically feel the agitation coil in her small frame. "I can take care of myself and if anyone thinks different he can go fuck himself."_

"_Yeah, okay," Raphael muttered. He wasn't going to break their vow. But I can make a new one, he thought, watching her blow cigarette smoke out of her nostrils like a bull ready to charge. Four nights a week—the nights you work the late shift—my patrol will end the same way…with you. _

Jaime lived four blocks away from the Lucky 13. She turned out of the alley and walked Bleeker Street, well-lit and populous at times—too open for him to join her on. Raphael stayed on the rooftops until she turned the darkened corner to her apartment.

Their routine, hers and his, was always the same.

Jaime waited in the dark for his soundless landing beside her. From there they walked together in silence, she down the middle of the alley, he in the shadows. When she reached the door to her building, she went in and Raphael went up the fire escape—three flights to her apartment. He was already on the escape landing by the time she came to unlock the window. In the beginning, his silence—the _utter quiet_ of his agile movements had unnerved her.

"You're like a big green ghost," she'd told him.

But his silence was not the only thing that unnerved her. Not by a long shot. Raphael remembered those nights early on when her luminous brown eyes would alight on him for only a few moments at a time, as though she couldn't take him in all at once. Nervousness, he'd quickly deduced, was unusual for her, but back then, her hands trembled slightly as she lit her cigarettes, and he felt that housefly glance of hers that rested on him only for seconds before taking off again.

Now, months later, he was pleased when she locked eyes with him during one of their heated discussions/debates. Her hands were strong and sure as she popped the caps off their beer against the edge of the counter. He liked that better than the furtive glances and trembling fingers that were only stilled after she'd jammed them into her pockets. But she hadn't screamed when she saw him for the first time that terrible night. True, she wasn't altogether herself and half out of her mind with fear, but still…She hadn't screamed and Raphael thought he loved her then.

But really, he knew it was the first time he'd seen her.

A hot, humid night in late July when she didn't wear a jacket and the tattoos on her arms were like bruises on her pale skin from his vantage on the roof. Her hair, with its long, soft curls—like red-tinged coils under the neon—cascaded down her back and hung loosely about the slender muscles of her arms. The cut of her arms against that soft hair, the soft dark pools of her eyes, her cutting laugh… She was hard and soft at the same time and the dual sensations and impressions she left on Raphael that first night he happened to glance down into the alley were forever emblazoned in his mind as what a woman—_his_ woman—should be.

"_Don't put me on a pedestal," she said._

_He quickly averted his eyes and silently cursed himself for staring. _

"_Don't flatter yourself," he returned, but it had no bite. _

_Jaime smiled, pleased. Raphael let it go. He didn't worship her. He had too much sense of himself for that, but he ceased to see other women as women. Maybe she knew that, maybe she didn't, but he suddenly didn't care. After three weeks of visiting her small apartment, after maintaining as cool a front as he could, he figured it couldn't hurt to let her feel admired. _

_And besides, playing it cool wasn't getting him anywhere… _

On this late-October night, as he landed silently beside her, she smiled her crooked smile in the darkness and then they walked. Raphael's sharp eyes followed her until she was safely inside and then he scaled the fire escape to the third floor. He leaned against the wall and waited, letting his gaze meander lazily up to the sky.

It was a clear night but no stars were visible. The relentless haze of the city lights colored the sky like a yellowing fog. Not like out on the farm where the sky was a black velvet swath dotted with thousands of diamonds. Jaime told him once that she had rarely been out of the city. Raphael wanted to take her to the farm and watch the starlight be absorbed in those deep brown pools of her eyes. A scowl touched his face for that wasn't ever going to happen. Not with the advent of Trevor. Trevor had gotten to her first.

The click of the window latch came from behind him and jarred Raphael from his thoughts. Jaime shoved open the window and he climbed through. They stood for a moment, in the narrow corner of her apartment. Raphael loved and hated these moments. Hated them because nothing ever came of their nearness and loved them because there was always that possibility that something might. He loved the smell of her—cigarettes and shampoo and her warm breath on his face. This was the time they said their hellos. On good days, she leaned against him briefly in a kind of half-hug, half-nudge with her hip—an acknowledgement that anyone else would have thought was small and meaningless. But Raphael knew Jaime didn't touch people very often, nor like to be touched, and so these little moments grew large for him. On bad days, if she was tired or in a foul mood, she'd chuck him on the arm, and always, no matter what, she'd demand the same thing. "What's the story, Raphael?"

Always, she called him 'Raphael.'

"_You can call me Raph. Everyone else does."_

"_That's reason enough why I won't," she replied off-handedly, poring over one of the many crossword puzzles she was so fascinated with_. _"Your name is beautiful," she added, chewing the tip of her pen. "Why ugly it up for the sake of familiarity? And who played Clinger on M.A.S.H? Four letters."_

"_Hell if I know," Raphael muttered. She was always doing that. Saying things that knocked him on his ass without ever knowing it. _

"_Jaime Farr," she said suddenly, and a sour look came over her face. "Speaking of names… I wonder if my parents realized I share one with a clownish, cross-dressing Korean War-era soldier," she mused wryly, filling in the clue._

"_Your name is perfect for you," Raphael said without thinking._

_She glanced up at him. He held his ground. "It is." _

_She smiled. "Thanks."_

"_Don't mention it," he said and returned to his beer. The rest of the evening was spent in relative silence, though a comfortable one, and Raphael thought that an infinitesimal step towards progress had been made. Maybe in another year I can tell her I think _she's_ perfect, he mused dryly. _

_But he didn't have another year…_

A.T. and B.T, that's how Raphael demarked the time now. After Trevor and Before Trevor. Before was the happy time and After was the dark ages. It had been A.T. for nearly a month and it seemed like this era was never going to end.

"What's the story, Raphael?" Jaime demanded this night, but a slight hesitation in her voice took the power out of it. "You want a beer? We had a party here the other night after Trevor's opening so I might have some vodka or…SoCo."

Raphael scowled and took off his street clothes—cap and jacket. "Beer," he said.

"How're the boys?" she asked, rummaging through the fridge.

Raphael glanced to stare appreciatively at her black leather-clad ass sticking out from behind the refridgerator door. "Fine. Mike says hi."

Jaime emerged from the door, two beers clutched in one hand by the bottlenecks and a scrunched up expression on her face. "You told them about me?"

Raphael snorted. "Mikey asked me why the hell I come back so late some nights and where I get the booze from."

"What did you tell him?"

Raphael looked at her. "I told him I go to Madame Rizzo's Dungeon, and that my girl always feels so sorry for me after working me over, she plies me with alcohol."

Jaime rolled her eyes. "Pig." She popped the caps off the beer and joined Raphael on the couch—she at one end and he on the other. She used to sit closer, but it was A.T. now. "You… are… hilarious," she added dryly.

"What's hilarious is that Mikey believes me," Raphael said and took a swig from his bottle.

"I thought you weren't supposed to tell anyone," Jaime said, lighting a cigarette.

"No, _you're _the one who's not supposed to tell anyone. I can take out an ad in the goddamn Times if I so choose."

"'If I so choose,'" Jaime snorted and laughed her cutting laugh. "Well, tell Mikey Madame Rizzo says 'hello.'"

Raphael nodded and took another swig off his beer. She shifted on her side of the couch and he became acutely conscious of her. It was hard not to be in an apartment this small.

Her apartment was two tiny rooms and a bathroom that resembled a closet. She paid $820 a month for the privilege that, in New Yorkian terms, was actually a deal. Paying rent was a foreign concept to Raphael but $820 for what she called her "glorified shit-hole" seemed like a lot. But the smallness of it reminded him of the lair, and the fact that Jaime would never be more than twenty feet away from him at any given time were pluses in his mind. She hated it. It was too expensive for a bartender's salary and she was sick of borrowing money from her grandmother. Or Trevor.

Raphael scowled.

"So where's _Trevor_ tonight?" he blurted without thinking. He didn't want to know, not particularly, and he knew he was in no danger of discovery or else Jaime would have said "Not tonight," when he landed beside her in the alley. Those, "Not tonights" were becoming more and more frequent. In B.T. they had meant that Jaime had some party or another to attend. A.T. meant the asshole was sleeping over.

"Why would you ask me that?" Jaime said, her dark eyes on his. "He's in Boston for a week, like you care. You hate his guts."

Raphael didn't dispute her on either point. He'd never met Trevor, of course, but he didn't have to to "hate his guts." Jaime was waiting for a response so Raphael shrugged.

"Of course he's out of town or else he would have been waiting for you at the bar to see you safely home," he said and accessorized his words with the fakest of fake smiles.

Jaime rolled her eyes but said nothing. Raphael relished the bitterness created by that sentence. It was a safe reason to hate Trevor—that the guy didn't think to make sure Jaime got home safely at night even though everyone knew she was too goddamned stubborn to do it herself. It was up to men to see to such things, Raphael thought, and so Trevor was a failure in that department for not protecting her as he should.

But that was a much safer reason to hate him than the real one and both Jaime and Raphael knew it. It was a neutral, impotent point that couldn't compare to the truth—that Trevor had trampled over something delicate and young and fragile and in doing so had forever earned Raphael's hatred. Because the simple fact was, in the glorious era of B.T., Jaime and Raphael had been a possibility.

Every offhand comment was leading toward a monumental confession. Every moment at the beginning of every night at the window held an alternate universe that was waiting to be explored. He was sure of it, but it was up to Jaime to take that first step for Raphael could not. It was not his place to cross over that threshold unless she did first; such was his handicap for not being altogether human.

One night, very close to the advent of A.T., Raphael had thought she was going to take that step. She had leaned closer to him than she had ever had and his heart had hammered wildly in his chest.

"Good night, Raphael," she'd said, like she said every night when he finally left her apartment to go home. But that night, her voice faltered and her eyes were wide. He saw in them fear and apprehension and—God help him—desire. But she didn't take that step. She must've seen what lay on the other side and had been afraid, or worse, ashamed. And so she had pulled away as though he had snapped a match alight under her chin.

Trevor came soon after.

Now, sitting on her couch, drinking her beer, Raphael suddenly knew this was the last night. He had heard it in her voice. Her customary question, "What's the story, Raphael?" was somehow a loaded one, and he knew perfectly well what the story was. They had come to an impasse and it was time they either scaled it together, or went their separate ways. _How_ he knew that, Raphael couldn't say. Some kind of tension in the air, perhaps. But more likely, it was simply a shared understanding that the time had come. Shit or get off the pot, as the saying went.

"What are you thinking about?" Jaime asked, unsure. She had, over the last three months, gotten good at reading his expressions.

Raphael looked at her, a thousand unsaid words in his mouth. He didn't let them out, but shrugged, and felt impotent and cowardly. Those were not words that came easily to anyone describing him, least of all himself, so he muttered a curse and sprang off the couch with a ninja-grace that seemed impossible for his bulky, heavily-muscled body. He paced her tiny living room, peering at photographs newly hung on the wall with a dour expression on his face.

Trevor was a photographer. Raphael wasn't learned in the art and so couldn't truthfully say one way or another if the guy had talent as far as development and shadowing and all that shit went. To Raphael, the subject was all that was important, and all of Trevor's subjects were the same—tired city people, homeless men on corners, bent and worn people waiting for buses. Jaime described his work using words like, "important" and "honest." Raphael preferred "depressing" and "pointless." That had been their biggest fight. Of all their heated debates on life, art, and who was the better villain, the Joker or the Scarecrow, they had battled fiercely because both were stubborn. But those fights had no malice or anger in them, no matter how loud the volume of their voices. But for that one night. It had been the first night she had put up some of Trevor's work, sealing his presence in her life—marking her, in some way, as his.

_"You know nothing about art," Jaime scolded with derision and Raphael could see behind her eyes the unstated fact that he lived in a sewer, in the dark. _

_Raphael heard those unspoken words clear as day and so made his own cruel and unfair. _

_"What's he doing?" Raphael demanded, a cigarette perched in the corner of his beak, bobbing up and down with his words. "This picture of a homeless woman outside a shelter? What a crock. You think this photo helped this woman? You think capturing her misery and showing it to a bunch of rich assholes helped her eat that night? It didn't. It helped those rich people, though. I'm sure they looked at it and felt "connected" and sympathetic. They called it "raw" didn't they?, while they sipped their_ _goddamned Chardonnay. What a bunch of phonies. That woman didn't get a hot meal for her kids because Trevor—" he always filled the name with such scorn—"took her goddamn picture."_

_After that, they had exchanged heated words and more than one epithet at the other's expense, and Raphael left that night wondering if he was going to be asked in the next._

_He was, but sometimes he thought it might be better if he hadn't… _

Now, those photos were mixed with half a dozen images of Jaime and Trevor together. Here they were at the Lucky 13, his arm slung around her shoulder and his hand dangling too close to her breast for Raphael's liking. Here they were at one of his shows—he in loose and rumpled finery and she looking dark and wild in black. And here they were on the porch of Trevor's grandparents' house outside Albany, for it had finally been Trevor—and not Raphael—who had shown Jaime her stars.

"You look at those and you're going to get pissed off," Jaime warned from the couch. "Come sit with me," she added softly and again Raphael heard in her voice the finality of these nights.

_Unless…_

Unless.

Raphael sat back down and drank his beer while she lit another cigarette. There was a thick silence between them and then Jaime said what Raphael knew she would say and his 'unless' fell apart and vanished.

"I have to tell you something."

"Yeah?"

"I'm moving in with Trevor," she said softly, so softly he almost hadn't heard. The words hung in the air like a small swarm of bees and although Raphael had expected them, they stung him nonetheless. He grunted in response and then there was another silence.

She waited for something more, but Raphael wasn't about to—or able—to give her the satisfaction. Jaime slammed her lighter—a heavy metallic Zippo—on the table and stood up.

"Aren't you going to say something?" she demanded, pacing behind him. "Aren't you going to tell me he's a big lazy fake and all that other shit you usually say?"

"Why should I?" Raphael countered. "Won't change anything." He twisted around to look at her. "Will it?"

Jaime sputtered for a moment. "You're such an asshole," she said finally and went into the kitchen-half of the room.

"All right, fine. He's a big lazy fake and you can do better."

"Oh, really?" Jaime demanded from the sink.

"Yeah, really," Raphael returned.

"Like who?"  
Raphael snapped his jaw shut with an audible clack. She was looking at him with a peculiar expression on her face, as though she were daring him to say it—as though she was _hoping_ he would say it.

"Hell if I know," Raphael muttered, and wondered just when, exactly, had he lost his backbone.

He had turned back on the couch and so did not see her face fall and then harden again, didn't see her eyes shine for the briefest of moments before she blinked them dry. She snapped the caps off two more beers—loudly—and stormed back to the livingroom. She shoved a bottle into Raphael's hand as she flopped beside him on the couch.

"Where?" Raphael asked after another silence.

"Where what?" Jaime asked, her tone wary.

"Where are you moving to?"

"No, Raphael," she said. "No, you can't. Not anymore."

Now it was Raphael's turn to slam his beer bottle on the table, hard enough that white foam erupted from the lip and spilled onto the floor. "Well, what the fuck, Jaime? Is it far from the bar? Far enough where you'll need to take a cab? Or close enough to walk? Because if you're gonna walk, then I need to know—No, fuck it. I'll just follow you."

"Geez, you sound like a stalker," Jaime spat. She regretted her words instantly—Raphael could tell by the way her jaw tensed, but she did not apologize.

Raphael looked at her. "Stalker," he repeated. "Uh huh."

"Raphael—"

"It doesn't matter," he said. "_Trevor_ isn't about to start paying attention to your post-work habits, so I have to."

"You _don't _have to," Jaime said, "I don't need a goddamn bodyguard."

Raphael looked sharply at her. "That's a hell of a thing for you to say to me," he said coldly. "You think that's why I do what I do? You think you're some kind of job to me? Yeah, that's it," he said, and began building the evening's main course of sarcasm. "You know, the real reason I want to know where you're moving to is so I know where to bill for my service."

"Stop it."

"And to keep track of you. You owe me back pay for four nights a week for three months. That comes to three thousand, eight hundred dollars and forty-two fucking cents."

"Shut up!"

"Not to mention the night you were almost _raped_—that should've earned me a bonus, don't you think?"

Jaime's response, a sharp intake of breath, told Raphael he had gone too far. He had broken their vow and there was no taking it back now. He watched as the memories settled themselves over her like a shroud yanked from the closet by Raphael's unrelenting venom. _You're such an ass,_ he told himself. _She didn't deserve that,_ he thought and another voice spoke up, rough and cold. _Yes, she did. She's been sleeping with _Trevor_ and she's moving away. She's telling you to get lost so say what you want and maybe it'll hurt her as much as she's hurting you. _

But that cold, angry voice brought little comfort. It was the same voice that told him, after a nasty fight with Leonardo, that he—Raphael—had been justified in leveling the most awful insults and cutting remarks at his brother. There was a wall of stabbing words between he and Leo and it was only torn down after some catastrophe brought them together, and quickly resurrected again in time. Raphael hated that wall between he and his brother and he realized he was well on his way to building a good-sized one between he and Jaime.

"Sorry," he said, the word sounding pitiful and empty in his own ears.

"Forget it." She pulled her legs under her, making herself small on her corner of the couch. He could see in her eyes that she was looking at that night in her mind, and he cursed himself silently.

Raphael stood up. His sais were still tucked in his belt and he noticed one had poked a hole in her ratty old couch. It was hardly noticeable what with all the cigarette burns, coffee stains, and the horrible flowered upholstery. He removed the sais and dumped them unceremoniously onto the carpet. Then he stormed into the kitchen and began opening cabinets.

"What are you doing?" Jaime asked in a small voice.

"I need—I don't know. A drink."

Jaime unfurled herself from the couch and went to him. She calmly opened the cabinet in which she kept her collection of shot glasses. She pulled down two—one that said "Kentucky" in chipped black letters, and another that said "Mississippi" over an etching of a paddleboat. She collected them from friends who traveled, Raphael knew, and the image of her and Trevor in Albany came to mind. He scowled.

Without asking, she poured tequila into the glasses and handed him Kentucky. Wordlessly, they met eyes, lifted their glasses and downed the liquor.

Raphael hated tequila but it was just what he wanted then. He felt it hit his stomach, which protested for a moment, as it always did, before settling warmly.

"I'm sorry I said that," Jaime mumbled as they went back to the couch. "About you being a bodyguard. You're more than that…"

Her words trailed away and Raphael wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake the rest of them out of her. But he only shrugged, sat down, and chased the tequila with a long swig of his beer. "When do you move?"

"As soon as Trevor gets back from Boston. A week."

Raphael said nothing.

"I won't be working at Lucky 13 anymore. You don't have to worry."

Raphael felt the thousand words ready in his mind again. He wanted to tell her that there was so much more between them than her safety. That a part of his happiness, a part of his _own_ safety, was bound up in these nights, but she already knew that. It had been there since that first night, the night they never talked about, and he hated her a little just then, for throwing it away.

"Well, I guess that's it then," he said, and bent to pick up his discarded sais. He felt her soft hand on his arm and he froze.

Silence came, thick and heavy, and something desperate and wild came over Raphael. He decided that now was the time—before she came to her senses and kicked him out for good—for him to try to resurrect his 'unless' from the dead.

Emboldened by the finality of this night—or more probably by tequila—Raphael leaned closer to her and touched her hair. He had wanted to from the moment he first saw her. She didn't slap his hand away or retreat from him, but sat still and quiet, her hand still on his arm, trailing up over the thick muscles. She closed her eyes and leaned her head into his hand, into his touch.

The curls were softer than he'd imagined to his rough, callused hands, and they twined readily around his fingers. Raphael kneaded his hand through that hair, pulling gently, pulling her towards him.

Raphael felt his heart begin to pound again as he leaned towards her and the portal he imagined every night at her window began to open in his mind's eye. A world of dark, hot nights and secret meetings was revealed and their possibility, coupled with the real touch of her skin, quickened his pulse _This is happening,_ he thought, not daring to breath. He moved closer. Her eyes were closed now and she parted her lips slightly. Raphael, his blood running hot in his veins, slowly laid his other hand on her cheek, slid it down over her neck, down to her breast.

She arched her back and moaned again, and Raphael felt victory close at hand as he shifted even closer to her. But as he did, his toe brushed his sais. They clanked together, softly, but the sound broke the silence and Jaime's eyes flew open. She saw him then and he froze. That second stretched out between them, and then the portal slammed shut as Jaime retreated from him. It was a small movement, a tiny sinking away into the couch cushions but it was enough.

He fairly flew away from her, to his side of the couch. The feel of her was still in his hands until he killed it by taking up his cold beer bottle. He emptied it in one gulp.

"I love him," she whispered.

"Bullshit," Raphael spat. He glared daggers at the sais at his feet, and then kicked the offending weapons that had, for the first time since he'd taken them for his own, betrayed him so horribly. "That's a goddamn lie."

"You don't know that!" Jaime said suddenly. She got up from the couch and went to the kitchen. "You think after three months you got me figured out? You think because you were there that night that you can say what I can and can't do?" She shook her head and muttered a curse to herself before declaring, "You don't know Trevor, either. He's good to me. And you know what else?" She poured two more shots of tequila and downed hers.

"What?" Raphael returned, rising to the bait.

"He's—"

Jaime bit off her words but it was too late—the phantom of it flitted into the room anyway and the air suddenly grew cold and thick.

"Yeah, okay, I get it," Raphael muttered after a moment. He stood up, gathered his sais and jammed them into his belt. He reached for his jacket.

Jaime watched him, wide-eyed, with something akin to fear as dressed to leave. "No, Raphael, I'm sorry," she breathed.

"It's fine," he muttered, settling his cap on the green dome of his head. "It's what I expected."

"Don't say that. It's not fair."

Raphael stopped and looked at her. "You're talking to me about _fair_?" He snorted and shook his head. "Fuck this. See you around." He was at the window in two strides.

"You can't leave!" she shouted from the kitchen. "Not like this. We aren't done yet."

She was right. He knew that the night, the night they never had spoken of, had been stirred from its hibernation like some ugly beast, and now that it was awake and prowling the room they couldn't pretend it wasn't there. He saw that she was ready to remember it too. She _needed _to remember it so that the bizarre relationship between her and a mutated turtle could be reconciled. Trevor was human, that's what she had been about to say and now the fact that Raphael was not could no longer be ignored. They had been going on for three months pretending reality was not as it was—that he was just a guy and she was just a girl and they hung out together sometimes. But there were feelings there between them that demanded attention, and that were the source of this night's arguing and insults and unspoken want. And there was something else there for her too, something that was alien and inconsequential to Raphael who lived a dangerous life—he had killed for her.

Among his brothers and sensei, killing was an unfortunate necessity. A bo staff cracked against the enemy's skull saves Michelangelo one night, and he returns the favor the next. There were no words exchanged over such things—the brothers did what they did, working in a kind of horrible tandem that brings death if necessary to others only so that it doesn't touch them. They never say 'thank you' and never need to.

But Jaime was not one of his brothers. She was of the other world—the one that went to bed every night after watching the evening news thinking that death sure sucked and _I'm glad it's not me._ It's never me. It never _will be_ me. But that night, Jaime tasted the life Raphael lived and the death he was skillfully capable of bringing, and he could see she didn't know what to do about it. He had saved her from rape, true, but the price for that salvation was high in other ways he hadn't ever thought of.

Raphael removed his jacket and dumped it on the floor. He went to the kitchen and emptied Kentucky. He took the fresh beer Jaime offered him and when they sat down on the couch, he took a drag off her cigarette too. He removed his sais and placed them carefully on the worn coffee table in front of them, and there they sat, gleaming in the dim light of her apartment like an exhibit at a trial.

Jaime looked at the sais for long moments, quietly sipping her beer. Finally, she lay the bottle down and picked up one of the weapons.

"It's heavy," she said, surprised.

Raphael nodded. Anyone who touched his sais—and there weren't many—all remarked on the weight of them.

Raphael watched as she ran her fingers along the longest prong and gingerly touched the pointed tip. "Was this the one…?"

Raphael shrugged. "Maybe."

"I think it was," Jaime said. She studied it a moment more and then laid it in her lap, almost protectively. "What's it like?"

Raphael shrugged again. "It's different every time. But mostly it's just what needs to be done. I don't think about it."

Jaime nodded, absorbing this. "How many?"  
It was on the tip of his tongue to lie and say he didn't know, that he didn't keep track. But the truth was, he remembered every single man who had died on the end of his weapons, that each life extinguished was permanently etched into his psyche. He wanted it that way. He was glad to feel _something_ every time a life ended at his hands, because in his mind, that acknowledgement of their passing was the only thing that made him different than the Shredder.

"One hundred and seventeen," he said and Jaime's face went pale. She took up the sai again and Raphael thought for a moment that she was going to toss it from her in disgust. But she only looked at it again, studying it, as if searching for old blood or some hint of the death that been wrought by it.

"And the one…that night?" she asked, looking at him now.

"He's accounted for," Raphael said.

Jaime nodded. She set down the sai. She set down her beer and she stubbed out her cigarette, nodding all the while as though she'd come to some kind of conclusion. She settled herself in her seat—braced herself, actually—and met his eye. "Tell me."

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

Raphael nodded. "How much do you remember?"

"All of it in pieces," she replied. "But it doesn't matter. I want to hear it from you."

Raphael considered this. "Yeah, okay," he said and then he told her their story.


	2. Chapter 2

He leapt over the gap between the buildings, cursing under his breath. The thug who had thought to rob his favorite Chinese grocer had put up a fight and Raphael's wrist ached for it. He had left the man lying in a pool of his own blood as sirens wailed. The thug would live, Raphael knew, minus a few teeth. Raphael acknowledged his own pain and pushed it aside to be dealt with later, if necessary. He had to concentrate for he had heard muffled shouts and a woman's scream—abruptly interrupted—coming from another alley. Raphael smiled a slow smile. Tonight was going to be a busy night.

His smile faded, however, as he neared the Lucky 13 bar. He knew before his keen eyes confirmed it that the bartender who worked the late shift had been the one who screamed. He cursed himself this time for being late. It had become his routine four nights a week to see the woman home in his own way—silent and unseen—and the one time she needed him, he wasn't there.

Raphael sped up, streaking across the rooftops with uncanny speed and silence. He saw them, in the dim, hot light of the alley and it was worse than he thought.

They already had her subdued, they were already tearing at her clothes—three of them, one pinning her against the wall and the other two waiting their turn. Raphael shimmied down a lamppost while simultaneously drawing his sais. He landed on the ground with the smallest of muffled thuds, directly behind the two men who stood nervously joshing one another and cheering the third man on. He swept the heads of the two together and they crumpled to the ground in a heap, likely never knowing what hit them. The third, fumbling at his belt, didn't see Raphael either until it was much too late.

His brothers, specifically Leonardo, had frequently commented on Raphael's temper. They called him 'hotheaded' and 'fiery' if they were being nice and 'reckless' and 'a bastard' if they were not. Raphael was okay with that. He took the comments like one takes a tacky gift that you know you're never going to use. You say 'thank you' politely and then discard it. To Raphael, they were silly little words that barely scratched the surface of the emotion that welled in him like a pool of molten rock.

The depth of his anger, the white-hot force of it, his brothers never knew.

They were glad for it in battle, when Raphael dispatched an enemy who was getting the best of them, to be sure. But they would never know the pure rage he felt that someone would dare try to hurt his family. There was a secret behind his anger, one that not even Splinter understood… Raphael killed as he did, with his anger fueling his every movement, only for the simple reason that he had to die before anyone else he loved did, and when an enemy tried to take that away from him, Raphael had no mercy.

He had no mercy for the thug either that pressed the woman against the wall—she beyond fear so that she only whimpered like a wounded cat. The thug wasn't a real threat to him and didn't deserve death, not yet, but if Raphael had come a minute later, he would have.

But the would-be rapist was already treading very thin ice. The woman was not Raphael's kin, but there was nothing in him at that moment to make that distinction. He grabbed the thug, a young man in a dirty shirt and three days worth of beard on his narrow face, and spun him around, so that Raphael's green visage, alien and fierce, was inches from the his.

"Give me one reason I shouldn't end you," the turtle hissed, clutching the man around the throat and laying the prong of his sai to his gut.

The thug went pale with fear, but his lips curled in a twisted version of a smile. "Wait your turn, freak," he returned with a croak of a laugh.

The man's face contorted with pain and his rasping laugh died away as Raphael squeezed the hand clutching his throat. "Wrong answer," he grunted, as a red haze descended over him. He drove his steel weapon into the man's stomach. Like a thick pillow, he punctured flesh and skin and Raphael felt his hand washed hot and sticky with blood.

The life in the man drained out, and so he slid down the wall and Raphael let him go. Almost as quickly as it had come, his anger faded and he breathed heavily for a moment. _One hundred and seventeen._

A crunch of glass and a strangled cry brought him around. He looked and saw the woman, her clothes in tatters around her, was crawling away. She had knelt in a nest of broken glass; her knee trailed uneven stains of blood on the dirty pavement, but she did not stop.

Raphael sheathed his sai. It was not safe to stay out. Death in the street, no matter how quiet, seemed to be sensed by others, and soon the wail of yet another set of sirens would be heard. Raphael almost left then, to make his escape before he had real trouble to contend with. Instinct told him to go, but this woman was no regular victim. She would not stand in the glare of any TV crew describing how she thought she was a goner but some heroic stranger had saved her and hadn't even stuck around for a 'thank you.' She was in a bad way. Her breath was coming in short, truncated gasps and her clothes, torn and dirty, exposed her enough so that even Raphael felt a redness in his face for looking at her. And besides that, he had killed for her and so now—somehow— she was his responsibility.

"Hey," he said softly, gently touching her shoulder.

The woman whimpered at his touch but did not cease her agonized crawl down the alley. Raphael glanced around quickly, assessing the situation.

There came a time in the lives of he and his brothers when the choice whether or not to reveal themselves to another came. It didn't happen frequently—there was no great collection of grateful shop owners and blind old ladies who counted the four mutants as their secret friends. But some instances, born of necessity, showed themselves as they had with April, as they had with Casey. And this was one of those times.

Quickly, Raphael removed his long trench coat and knelt beside the woman. She was still trying to escape, one hand clutching at her torn top, the other scraping along the littered ally. She stopped and let out a little cry as his coat fell over her shoulders and she looked up at him with wide, wild eyes.

"It's okay," Raphael soothed awkwardly, wishing suddenly that Michelangelo were there. His little brother was much better at this sort of thing than he—always ready with a small joke to take the sting out of the inevitable freak-out that was coming. But the woman did not scream, she only looked at Raphael. She took in his face under the red mask—his wide, green mouth and brown eyes that were the most human part of him and she did not scream.

"Wha—wha…you?" she gasped.

_What are you?_ she asked and Raphael, feeling time speeding past him, only shrugged.

"Help," he said.

The woman took this in and seemed to approve. She nodded weakly and Raphael took a quick inventory of her. Aside from a few bruises the thug hadn't hurt her, but her knee was a mess—a pincushion of jagged glass and dripping blood. Without thinking, without wanting another moment that belonged to his escape to slip away, Raphael helped her draw on his coat, covering her nakedness, and then lifted her easily in his arms. She was a small thing, not much taller than he, and very light. She clutched the trench around her protectively and astonished Raphael by leaning her head against his plastron. He held her tightly for a moment, wanting to hold her together, wanting her to not feel as undone as she probably did. And then he took off.

He didn't know where to go, but _away_ was the only real destination. He held her easily and raced down one alley and then another, sticking always to the shadows.

"Where do you live?"

She looked up at him, her rapid breathing easing slightly and told him, without hesitation, her address. Raphael nodded, inwardly cursing for he had gone—of course—three blocks in the exact opposite direction. He started to move and she clutched at him.

"Are… they c-coming after us?" she whispered.

Raphael shook his head. "No. You're safe."

The woman nodded and pressed her face against him and that's how he ran with her to her apartment.

There was no going in the front door, of course. He climbed the fire escape with agility, not at all encumbered by her slight weight in his arms. The window, he was glad to see, was open, no doubt to let some of the stifling July heat vent out. He shoved it open and crawled inside, still holding her tight against him.

The room was dimly lit, and very small. In three strides he was at the couch and he gently laid her down. She shrank into the cushions, still clutching his trench coat around her protectively. Raphael stood for a moment, unsure.

"That needs looking at," he said, indicating her knee. But the woman shook her head vigorously. She was in a shock, a mild form of it, but Raphael had seen it enough times to know that she wasn't about to get up and call a cab to take her to the hospital. She was looking at him with her wild, frantic eyes but the meaning in them was clear: _This is between you and me now. Just you and me… _

Raphael nodded. "Okay."

He crossed to the kitchen and rummaged around in her cupboards. He found a bottle of vodka in one and a dirty glass in the sink. Vodka was not his first choice but it would do. He poured a fair amount of the clear liquor into the glass and returned to the couch. She was fumbling to light a cigarette from a pack on the table but her hands trembled so badly, she kept dropping the Zippo.

"Here, drink this," Raphael said, pressing the glass into her hand. She sipped at it and then he lit her cigarette for her.

"Thank you," she whispered brokenly and tears suddenly filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. She wasn't sobbing, not really. It was as though her eyes had simply sprung a leak and that was shock too.

"No problem," Raphael said. He knelt beside her. "I have to clean this up," he told her.

That's what he _said_. What he _meant_ was that he had to push his coat up to her thigh, that he had to touch her with his green, three-fingered hands. But she only nodded.

He slowly lifted the coat and assessed the damage. Now he wished Donatello were there, for his brother knew best how to clean and dress wounds. But Raphael had seen his fair share and had watched Don work on himself or his brothers countless times over the years. He nodded once to himself, and rose from his crouch.

"You gotta first aid kit?"

She shrugged and then shook her head no, taking a shaky drag off her cigarette and spilling ash down the front of his coat.

"Well, I gotta go rootin' around your place, then," Raphael told her. "Hope you don't mind."

The woman made some sort of noise the turtle took for, "That is perfectly fine by me," and he went to her bathroom to gathering supplies.

Under her sink, behind the tampon boxes and dozens of bottles of dark nail polish, he found a manicure set. He dumped the contents into the sink and pawed through them until he found a pair of tweezers. He also found a roll of gauze, never opened, behind some sort of hair-drying contraption. He snatched that up, along with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Then he returned to the kitchen where, under that sink, he found a wiry brillo pad. He doused the pad in vodka, then tucked the bottle under his arm and returned to the couch.

The woman was breathing better, but her wide-eyed gaze went here, there, and everywhere.

"What's yer name?" Raphael asked, kneeling beside her and laying out his tools on the coffee table.

"Jaime Rhodes," she said, her voice slightly stronger.

_Jaime. It's perfect on her. _"Hey, Jaime," he said. "I'm Raphael."

She managed to look at him for half a second—to take in his distinctly non-human shape and color—before looking away again. "That's pretty," she said.

"Yeah, it's _pretty_ all right," he muttered, studying her knee. Slowly, he laid one hand on the smooth skin of her calf and took the tweezers in the other. "You a bartender, Jaime?" he asked. _Stupid question,_ he thought, but once when Michelangelo had dislocated his shoulder, Donatello had kept asking questions to try to keep their little brother's mind off the pain while he prepared to reset it. It seemed to work okay then, so Raphael kept going. "You work at the Lucky 13, right?"

Jaime nodded.

"How long you worked there?" He was deftly plucking shards of glass—some long and nasty and some short—from the flesh of her knee, but if it hurt her at all, she showed no sign.

"I don't know," she murmured. "A while. W-where do you come from, Raphael?"

Raphael didn't look up from his work. "Around."

"What are you?" she asked again.

"It's a long story, Jaime," he told her. The skin of her calf was soft under his hand. He glanced up from his work and she quickly looked away. "Sometime, maybe, I'll tell ya."

He didn't mean it, of course. It was strangely nice to be in her apartment, this woman he had watched from afar for so longl. And touching her leg was an added bonus, but he held no illusions that she _wanted_ him there. Not really. She was in shock and he was helping her, and if things went as he hoped, the adrenaline in her veins would run its course and she'd suddenly become supremely tired. She would sleep and he would leave and that would be the end of it. Better for her that way; Raphael didn't have the luxury of wondering if it was better for him.

"Raphael?" She seemed to like saying his name.

"Yeah?" he replied, laying aside the tweezers. The large shards of glass were out but she had gravel and glass dust scraped into her knee. He took a break and poured her another bit of vodka because the next step was going to hurt like a sonofabitch.

"Raphael, what happened to… to those men?"

To buy time, the turtle took a swig of vodka straight out of the bottle. She didn't know, not yet, but she had a suspicion. Even out of her mind with terror, she must have sensed the death. A living being just knows, but Raphael wasn't so sure she was ready to hear it spoken aloud.

"They're not going to hurt you anymore," he said and her lower lip began to tremble.

"I'm usually ready," she said, her sobs starting to catch up to her crying eyes. "I h-have pepper spray, b-but they were too fast."

"Sshh, hey, it's okay," Raphael said. He hated to see women cry. Whenever April teared up that was his cue to leave the room. He patted Jaime awkwardly on the shoulder.

"If you hadn't come…"Jaime was sobbing openly now, rough shudders shaking her body. Raphael took the vodka glass out of her hand that was one sob away from dumping its contents down his coat. He continued to pat her on the shoulder, feeling like an ass the whole time. When April was upset, Donatello hugged her until she felt better. Raphael wondered if he was supposed to do the same. _ I sure as shit wouldn't mind…_

Then as abruptly as they had begun, her sobs ceased and she fumbled for another cigarette. She seemed suddenly angry, and Raphael recognized the ping-ponging emotions as part of the shock too. _She's more shaken up than I had thought. 'Course, can you blame her? I'm probably not exactly the knight in shining armor she envisioned…_

As though to prove his words, she took a drag off her smoke and snapped, "But just what the fuck are you? A big…what? A _turtle_?"

"Yep," Raphael said, gritting his teeth. Her derision—shock-induced or no—stung him more than he liked or had expected.

She snorted and took another shaky drag. She wasn't looking at him and tears were welling in her eyes again—the anger was slipping away as quickly as it had come. He could see she was unnerved by her rampaging emotions and more than a little bit frightened at her inability to control them. Raphael forgave her immediately. "You got family?"

She nodded and said rapidfire, "Yes. A grandmother. She's nice. Sends me money."

"Sounds good."

"What about you?" she ventured, slower now. "You have a…family?"

_Are there others like you? _is what she meant. Raphael nodded. "Yep. Father, three brothers."

"And your father?" she asked. "Is he…the same?"

"No…uh, no," Raphael replied. So far, she had done okay with the fact that there was a mutant turtle scraping glass out of her knee, and that he wasn't the only one in the city, but in her delicate condition he thought he'd be pressing his luck if he told her Splinter was a giant rat.

But Jaime either saw his hesitation or was too out of it to press him further. _Or maybe she just doesn't want to know that badly. Hell, I can't blame her. _

But she surprised him by asking gently, "Are they…like you?"

Raphael nodded. "Yeah. My brothers are like me."

"What are their names?"

"Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Donatello," he said, and dabbed her knee with gauze dampened by hydrogen peroxide.

"Why? I mean, what's the, um, story?" Jaime asked. She took another sip of vodka, no doubt in an effort to smooth her words that were coming out choppy and broken.

"Our father found an old art book lying around and thought they sounded good, I guess. I'm not really sure. I never asked him."

"He's right," Jaime said. "They do sound…good."

Raphael shrugged. He began folding a strip of gauze into a square to serve as a bandage. "They're all right. Mikey says all the good ones end in 'O'."

"I like your name, Raphael," Jaime said quietly.

Raphael didn't say anything and he didn't look up at her. He laid the square of gauze over her knee and began winding another long strip over and around her leg to hold it in place.

"Tell me about them. Your brothers."

All the old cautions coming back—the ones that Leonardo was forever harping on; warnings that they should never, ever tell outsiders more than they needed to know. It was one point Raphael actually agreed with Leo about so he was surprised to hear himself answer truthfully.

"Well, Leo's the oldest and our leader, I s'pose. Donnie's the smart one and Mikey is always out for a good time."

"What about you?"

Raphael shrugged again, his eyes on his work. "Not much to say about me. I'm the one that picks fights and stays out too late."

"I'm so glad," Jaime said with a sigh, "that you stay out too late." He glanced up at her then. She was looking not at him, but at the wall beyond, and he could tell by the shine in her eyes that her shock was wearing off and her mind—her rational mind—was starting to confront what had happened.

"Tell me more about them, your brothers," she said, fighting back the tears. "It's too quiet and then I start thinking of other things, you know?"  
"I don't know what else to say about them—"

"Anything."

He thought for a minute before speaking. It wasn't often someone asked him to talk about his brothers—April and Casey had been around long enough. But once he started talking, he just kept going, for he was suddenly proud for them, and the affinity he felt for them, the kind words he could never say to them, he said to Jaime.

"Well, Michelangelo is the youngest. He gets picked on a lot, especially by me, because he pulls pranks and can be a pain in the ass. But he's always happy, that guy. He's always smiling and making jokes and finding the best in things and people. You might think he's soft and weak for it, but I think he may be the strongest one of all of us sometimes. I mean, how can you knock a guy who faces all the shit life throws at us with that goofy laugh of his? Mikey's a much better guy than we give him credit for. He's a much better guy than me, that's for sure."

"Uh huh." Jaime took a deep breath and a less shaky drag off her cigarette.

"Donatello is real quiet," Raphael continued. "Not like he's shy or anything, he just kind of blends into the background sometimes 'cause he's always working on his computer or his lab or something. You sort of forget he's there until you need him and then you're _real_ glad he's there. He's a damn genius and if we weren't how we are, he'd be working for some huge company, making piles of dough and livin' the good life. His mind was born into the wrong body, I s'pose. That's Don, anyway."

"And the other one? Leonardo?" She was listening intently now and the glassy shine of fear in her eyes was finally starting to dim.

"Leonardo…" Raphael agreed "He's our leader, like I said, and he sure takes a lot of shit for it. Again, mostly from me. But he doesn't complain. He's like the guy at the bottom of the totem pole, you know? He's got all of us on him, weighing him down, but he just takes it. He takes all our shit, all of _my _shit….We fight a lot, him and me. That's on account of how we don't see eye to eye on a lot of stuff. But when it comes down to it, when the shit hits the fan in the end, he's going to be left standing, I just know it. And that's how it should be."

"You mean, you'd die for him," Jaime said dully.

Raphael glanced sharply at her. "Right, well, you're all set," he said. He tied the end of his makeshift bandage so that it was secure around her knee. "That should hold you until tomorrow at least. You should see a doctor though. You probably need some stitches and maybe a tetanus shot, or something. Hell, I don't know."

She nodded but he saw that she wasn't really listening anymore. Her eyes were still on the wall and the ash on her cigarette was growing longer and starting to droop. Raphael stood up from his kneeling position beside the couch, intending to leave.

"I'm so tired, Raphael," Jaime said without looking at him, "but I feel like there is something I should say to you. Not 'thank you'. That sounds weak and…poor. But something…"

"You don't have to tell me anything," Raphael said.

She shook her head in disagreement, but her eyes were closing against her will, just as he knew they would now that the shock had ebbed from her. "I hate being afraid," she murmured. "And I was so afraid of what was going to happen, afraid of _them,_ that I wasn't afraid of _you_." She met his eyes and smiled thinly. "Does that make sense?"

"Yeah. It does."

Jaime nodded, satisfied. "I just…I'm really glad for you, Raphael. No matter what. No matter that you seem unreal to me. I'm so glad that you're not. You _are_ real…"

Her eyes closed again and Raphael thought she had fallen asleep, and he felt the time had come for him to leave. _But my coat…_His trench was wrapped around her and there was no way to remove it without, at the very least, waking her up. _And at worst, she's going to think I'm a pervert like those assholes who jumped her. _

Raphael stood for a moment, pondering his dilemma, when Jaime flinched suddenly and her eyes flew open.

"Dammit," she whispered. "Goddammit to hell." Her eyes were filling up again and she looked at him. "You need to go, huh? You need your coat back and you're going to leave and I probably won't see you again. Shit, I'm too tired to do this right. I want to talk to you but I can't keep my eyes open and when I close them I see those men. Will you stay with me, Raphael? For a little while? I'm not like this, really. I'm not a chickenshit, but…Stay with me. Please."

Raphael said nothing for a moment. She seemed so ashamed of her fear but he wanted to tell her he would stay with her as long as she needed him, that he had wanted to ever since he stepped foot in her tiny apartment. He knelt beside her again, this time closer to where her head lay.

"Yeah, I'll stay with you, Jaime," he said in a low voice. "Get some sleep, will ya? I'll be here when you wake up."

She nodded weakly, and her eyelids fell shut again and this time they didn't open again until the morning. It was then, with the sunlight creeping into her tiny livingroom and onto his green skin and glinting off the hard shell of his back, that he thought she would awake to find her oh-so-bizarre nightmare was actually real, and then she'd scream and cry and fly into hysterics. But she didn't.

Jaime smiled at Raphael, she on the couch and he curled uncomfortably in the chair across from her, and offered to make him some coffee. _Like it was nothing. Like I was anyone. _ Raphael looked away quickly and shrugged.

"Yeah, sure. Why not?"

And that's how it happened.

Jaime wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and said into the silence that had descended thickly after Raphael had finished, "You should have kissed me."

"When?" he asked, and set his beer down before she could see in his hands how her question had thrown him. _Holy shit, here it is. After all this time. _But instead of feeling happy or hopeful, a sour bitterness settled over him. She wasn't declaring her love or lust for him, she was merely resentful he hadn't ripped the bandage off the wound a lot sooner. _ This is not how it's supposed to go. _

"When should I have kissed you?" he repeated. "When you were lying there, all fucked up and scared? You think—"

"_No_," Jaime cut in. "Tonight. Last night. Any night you been here since fucking _July,_" she said, her voice rising with every word. "You think you can just go and do something like that? Kill some guy and then we're just…what? The same as everyone else?" She rose up off the couch to stand over him. "That we're _normal_?"

"You don't want me to, Jaime. Believe me."

"Maybe. But if you had, then it wouldn't be a fucking issue anymore. It would just be done and that's it."

"Yeah, right. And every time you flinch away, I'll just take it. I'll just pretend I can't feel how much you wish I was just _some guy_ and not what I am."

"It's not like that."

"I'm not stupid, Jaime. And I'm not going to let you torture me because you feel like you _owe _me something."

"It's… not… like… that," she said again, speaking each word slowly and distinctly through clenched teeth.

Raphael whirled on her. "It _is_ like that!" he seethed, gripping her forearm hard enough to make her flinch. "You did it tonight and you'll do it again. You think because I helped you that night that you owe me? Maybe you like me, and maybe you could force yourself to kiss me or fuck me or whatever, but it'd mostly be out of pity or _duty_. Well, no thanks." He released her arm and pretended he didn't see the red marks he had left on her pale skin.

"Duty?" Jaime spat back. "Just what the hell do you take me for? That my thanks for saving my ass would be to sleep with you?"

"No, you'd do it because maybe you like me enough, but it wouldn't last," Raphael retorted. "You don't like me well enough to make a habit out of it, that's for goddamn sure. And even if you did, I would know the truth. I would know every time you got invited to one of your precious parties that I couldn't come to. I'd know any time one of your friends dropped by and you shoved me in the closet like some kind of dirty secret. And you'd feel embarrassed and all that shit. I'd _know. _ And I'd hate it and that's why I never kissed you no matter how badly I wanted to. Because it's not up to me. It's up to you, Jaime. You gotta decide if you can handle this, 'cause there's not a goddamn thing I can do about it. And you know what? I shouldn't have to. I don't _want _to."

Raphael felt as though, but for the night he told her about his brothers, that he'd never spoken more words in a row in his entire life. His penetrating gaze—the one Mikey called his 'death glare'—was fixed on her and unrelenting. She met his gaze…for a time and then slumped. She wiped her hand over her eyes and shook her head, her mane of curls falling over her shoulders.

"It's not fair," she cried. "No goddamn fair. What am I supposed to do? I'd become a liar to everyone I know. And I _would_ have to hide you, Raphael, for the exact same reason you can't step foot outside without that trench coat! So don't talk to me about how poor, poor Raphael doesn't get to play with my friends when you know perfectly goddamn well that it's _impossible."_

"Others have done it," Raphael spat. "We have friends. We—"

"Good for them. I'd like to meet these enlightened and honorable friends of yours," Jaime returned, her tone soured by sarcasm. "I'm sure they're saints, each and every fucking one of them, but don't tell me they parade you and your brothers around _their_ friends and family, because I know they _don't_."

"That's right, they don't," Raphael said, his voice trembling with rage. "They don't tell anyone to _protect our safety_, not because they're fucking _ashamed_."

Jaime opened her mouth and then snapped it shut again, an angry retort dying in her mouth. "I'm not ashamed. I'm not."

Raphael looked at her a moment, held her gaze. "I don't believe you."

A silence descended that grew long until he sighed. Tears filled her eyes then and Raphael felt his anger melt away. He stepped closer to her, touched her arms. "You have a choice, Jaime. You can make it fair, if you want." _If you want me enough. _He held his breath, waiting, and when she looked up at him, hope flared at what he saw in her eyes…and then died.

He saw her take him in and then retreat. If she held his eyes, if she locked on to his brown-eyed gaze, she might make it. His eyes were the most human part about him, but they were not enough. Her own trailed slowly over the rest of him, down to the green, three-fingered hands that were touching her. He saw himself in her own brown depths and didn't like what he saw. _I am not that, _came a thought and suddenly it became so much easier to turn and leave.

"Okay, then," he said, his voice low and gruff. He turned and picked up his sais, put on his coat and cap. "At least I know."

"Raphael…" Her voice was pleading but only half-hearted. That stung him almost as much.

He moved to the window and hauled it up. Cold air swirled in and Jaime hugged herself. Raphael cursed at the urge that still lived in him to go to her and protect her and keep her safe from cold or any goddamn thing at all. But it was dying too. He loved her, and he could understand her aversions, but he was not about to let those aversions tear him up.

Raphael had one leg out the window and one leg in. He stopped and turned to her—her cheeks streaked with tears she wasn't bothering to wipe away. "This is me," he said. "The way I am is how I saved you that night."

"I know," she said in a small voice but nothing more.

A tight smile touched Raphael's wide, flat, and green mouth. "Yeah, so do I."

And then the windowsill was empty.

He watched her home for the rest of that week before she moved away to some unknown part of the city. She walked fast, kept her eyes on the ground, and didn't run into any trouble. The vengeful part of him almost wished she would have so that he might prove how much she needed him.

Maybe she could have learned to overlook the differences that separated them but Raphael didn't want to endure the time it would take for her to do it. And so he said a silent goodbye as she rounded the corner to her apartment that final night and he didn't look back. He bounded silently over the rooftops and didn't hear the soft step of her footsteps come back around, nor did he hear her whispered words, tinged with regret and ice and swallowed by the frigid air. If he had, he might have stopped and reconsidered, just for the rarity of hearing such words from the mouth of a beautiful woman.

But Raphael was already gone, swallowed into that same cold, and Jaime stood alone in the shadows and asked again and again for the night to give him back.

END


End file.
